Days after India’s Competition Commission disposed of a complaint alleging unfair business practices by Amazon Seller Services and related entities, five US lawmakers levelled serious charges on the parent firm for engaging in “a pattern and practice of misleading conduct that suggests it was acting with an improper purpose to influence, obstruct, or impede the investigation and inquiries by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary”.

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“There's no factual basis for this, as demonstrated in the huge volume of information we have provided over several years of good faith cooperation with this investigation,” Amazon India told CNBC-TV18 over email when asked about the US lawmaker’s demand to that the US Department of Justice probes the company.

In a statement on Friday, Balkrishna Bhartia, national president of CAIT, and Khandelwal said: “Now that the 24-page letter is in the public domain, it is incumbent upon Indian regulatory agencies to wake up and take immediate cognizance of how Amazon engaged in a pattern and practice of misleading conduct that appeared designed to influence, obstruct, or impede the Committee’s 16-month investigation into competition in digital markets.”

“Indian agencies should conduct a time-bound probe into the business models of Amazon as it has been established several times that Amazon is continuously violating the rules and the law without any fear,” they said in the statement.

In India, the All India Online Vendors Association, representing over 2,000 sellers, had moved CCI complaining of “anti-competitive arrangements amongst entities, resulting in alleged lack of platform neutrality on Amazon.in.” It had been said that Amazon Wholesale, in collusion with Amazon Retail and Cloudtail India, sells goods at massive discounts, rendering independent sellers unable to compete on Amazon.in.

Discarding the matter, the CCI had said that there does not exist sufficient material to form a prima facie view in the matter. "The information contains allegations that are devoid of admissible/requisite evidence," it said.

The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) had hit out hard against the CCI for dropping the charges. “It is utterly shocking that Amazon is flouting norms in broad daylight but India's Anti-Trust Regulator has decided to drop this investigation,” Praveen Khandelwal, Secretary-General of the CAIT, tweeted.

But after the US probe surfaced, CAIT is asking the Indian government to wake up.

The US lawmakers said in their letter: “In its first appearance before the Committee during the investigation, Amazon lied through a senior executive’s sworn testimony that Amazon did not use any of the troves of data it had collected on its third-party sellers to compete with them. But credible investigative reporting showed otherwise.”

The letter gives reference to The Wall Street Journal reports that said that although Amazon “has long asserted, including to Congress, that when it makes and sells its own products, it doesn’t use the information it collects from the site’s individual third-party sellers,” “interviews with more than 20 former employees of Amazon’s private-label business and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal reveal that employees did just that.”